Next issue will wrap up this series.
16.5
Feed the bond of love — feed it to the disinclined — we’re good at changing minds — when the change is to submission — how wise it is to shackle giving-up to conscious minds, that that could even be an option — not to disrupt the ones like us, the ones we’ve never met. Preserve culture — preserve art! Preserve all kinds of books. This alone will go against submission — it’s the part of love that seeks and nurtures wisdom — subsumes in the inanimate, it’s part of our collective. Conclusions happen in an instant — love has a thinker and a prover — it will prove the loving thoughts occurring. Love makes happy those who have it — it’s misery for those who deeply need it — their sounds are rattles — they make fists around their own complaints, unseeing but they won’t let go — constant clashing makes them proud. Love itself does not explain — when asked it will respond “no comment” — many will live out their lives thinking love is mute — the aging mass is skeptical that love is more than just an act, more than just volition — people speak up claiming that they’ve clearly heard love’s voice (they can’t agree on how it sounds, for some its voice is masculine, or that in a higher register, and for some it’s feminine, or that in a deeper register) — some of them will make it, some will make it worse — leaving in their wake a market for old buttons, the ephemera of struggle, canceled print jobs in the queue. Our hero’s part in love was the sexual release that left him hyperventilating, so that like a cartoon he had to breathe into a paper bag, and our heroine said, “what’s wrong with you?” and he coughed out, “I don’t know” — the years went by with nights of barely sleep, the sense of touch directing. Her part was in the motion, and its cease.
As oceans cover more the land, it leads to mass migration, beaucoup refugees, fugee camps all over, camps on neutral grounds, on St Charles Avenue, barricading streetcars and then moving in, keep out the raining hurricanes dear ones, these camps you might come out of. A new dam’s here to take away their livelihood, they cannot fish on solid ground, their houses are on stilts for no good reason anymore, it cannot flood without a river, grandmas can’t get up there, once they’re carried up, they’ll exit only once. Children do not need to micturate when standing neath the sun all day, selling hand-sewn bracelets, candy, flowers to the lovers, unaffected by the dam. Child prisoners to more than capital, to weather too, baking through the nights in summer, chilly down to freezing in the parts that don’t come up. Their lot of slavery’s not hopeless, it is normal. It’s the lot they were born into. And if by miracle they’re educated, when they grow up more than half of them will vote for their oppressors. How quick it goes from Washington to the sticky palms of Hamiltons who annex the new pot.
Hero and heroine delivered not a child but truth unto the world, on the springy bench seat of an old sedan — they joined the greater mystery, affected other people — parents heard at evening through closed doors gasping mightily, “remind us how we erred” — and it did remind them, but they basked regeneratively, “give us purpose, give us rest.” Love itself repels contentment, is a function of our sleep — resist it long enough and we’ll go mad — “submit,” commands both sleep and love — yes of course, say we. Summer ends and Monika takes off to find such love again — she cannot face the truth she made, it’s lying in the cradle — given form, and upon that there’s no containing. She smells of substances — returns for as long as her worlds will coexist, which isn’t long, when Jan’s home with the baby. He’ll live their truth so that she ain’t gotta — the backseat’s not for riding anymore — though he’ll try — in fact he is the driver now, his ID’s in the diaper bag, he doesn’t have the village that it takes and now he doesn’t have her either. She has the lesson — it is raw but it can be effectively forgotten — for freedom is the choice of state — and love is disappointing someone from the start, once we reach a certain age — it’s overlooking what we do not have, de-emphasizing what we want — to get along is to finally accept the hurt — to to see the truth one’s made from every angle — to make its fleeting positives the focus of one’s life.
Love means buying someone’s whole back catalog — we’d love anyone who’d do that for us — not picking out the hits but buying everything, the B-sides, early bedroom stuff, and import-only singles — and listening unto it all — man I mean it all — like mainlining that shiz — to the 67 takes of every song — track one, then one, then one again — and keeping to the openest of minds, responding to each take as though it was the first time hearing — listen to it hard as possible, harder than cool poses.
It’s plain the mass of men and women don’t mature that much. It is against their own self-interest, when capital rewards their being infantile, or simple, credulous. They reinforce their false beliefs much stronger than a levee. The most moral they can be is righteous lamentation. The worse they vote (or don’t vote), the harder that we cling to love. We bake it into all our institutions, returning for the morsels of nutrition, docile toward the chemicals and sugar, avoiding all attempts at our correction.
Other attitudes can take the place of love. One is stubbornness, that swift returner of control, the grand intransigence of pride, the final crumb of power in the powerless, the no for power’s sake, negation of control upon them. “I’m certain” means that it seems clear, which does not mean it’s fact.
The bright orange sky makes joy swell up within us, but it’s from a raging forest fire, and should not be breathed. Harangues of languages, sanguine in their washing, changing minds by changing particles of thought, we confide not in each other but in entities. The Homeowner’s Association allows one boisterous laugh in our backyard after sundown. We do not tip, there is no need to, retribution is impossible in the service industry. They’re timed how fast they find a good on countless shelves and pack it in a box. Our neighbor runs the power plant, across the street the judge. The bugs are sprayed, the lawns immaculate. Buzz in for delivery or handy work, the only buzzes heard. See our outdoor decorations from the cameras on a drone, which will report forthwith.
They seek beauty who would love. It hides in the tall grasses. It mimics insect calls. Sometime in relationships a lover will begin that scratchy song, then will place it on repeat, for years if so allowed, that is, accepting of one’s presence, in a deal one makes with one’s own consciousness, addressing it like a tough guy cop, kneeling on our necks. If we leave off, it will change.
All the breaks that ever were were given, all the beauty was encouraged, all the ugliness exiled. Love is not to blame for broken hearts, for love is constant. It is we who change from day to day, we shave and trim our nails, we suddenly decide a shirt we’ve favored should be put away for good, we gussy up our prim identities, then use astringent ‘ere we go to sleep. The little changes aggregate, and then we realize one morning that our love is based on who they were not whom they have become. We curse at love not seeing it’s unchanged. The increments is us we have not noticed.
The ocean tells us, “take this plastic back.” We find another place to put it, or leave it where it washes up on Turkish shores. The plastic’s falling on us too. The sky is in a haze. We issue plastic helmets and we wear them when we sleep.
Puck stole Cupid’s arrow on a random stabbing spree. He laughed for decades, what he wrought, bringing opposites together, leaving children on the sacrificial altar, garroted with a bayonet, for want of a new pelvis to sneeze into.
It may cause discomfort, but the temples can’t be templates anymore.
Every person has potential, should have a place to play, and one to work at by their choosing. The stakeholders will have to find another way to ostracize; rest easy, it is certain that they will, with unintended consequences for the poor down by the dam, who will not leave there though they’re starving, though they send their children to the passing road with chocolates for sale, begging coins with eyes enlargened by their sunken cheeks. Of course their fathers needn’t fuck the women underneath them, but they cannot afford condoms, and the drive to reproduce is in them. To erase this drive in all humans would be to save the world, the biosphere, save the animals close to extinction, save the rainforests too. Then human beans would reproduce only by conscious decision. Eventually they’d have enough. Their population would recede to sustainable conditions for all life on terra, in the oceans, as a whole.
The stakeholders and asps have all the wealth, may love light up their insides, sure, may it, but it won’t. May the next two lovers entering an intimate connection feel it separated from their lower drives, as a way to tear love from its history, to fill the space between them with a love apart from pattern, filtered of impurities, such that relief itself is obsoleted, for the state in which it’s needed is erased, and memory becomes a treasure box that cannot be degraded.
One can feel love anytime, just by carefully imagining one’s sending waves of love to everyone in town, including those whose roads are barred by gates. Love is filling others’ needs when there’s a two-stroke engine blowing leaves inside one’s head, when they’re sharing their emotions while garbage trucks are backing up for hours in one’s head, when children dance around a sprinkler and executive-branch sirens repeatedly go by at 110 decibels, when one gives them what the moment is demanding and propagandists twist the buttons of the credulous up to peak cacophony, in one’s inner ear. Love is being triggered by behavior that had harmed one in the past, but one is in adult shoes now, and must be mindful of one’s mal-response in muscle memory, and not let the past inform the present, in this case, but make the move that reinforces optimism, that makes a positive deposit in the other’s memory bank.
Life took place beneath a blanket, where the feeling of the womb had never left two people. They have a tale that lets them touch their longing, immortality, that love is of, and they can be immortal too because they have shared of it, love’s immortal, they’ve felt its truth and so they’ve learned it, so that they can pass it on. The subconscious has melded with it for all time. It lingers in the unconscious collective, touching everyone, even those who ain’t been born, that’s in our hearts when we’re abandoned, that spoons us from dreamland. We feel how Heloise enthralled her Abelard, understand completely without filtering how Barrett embraced Browning — our heroine’s was half of that, our hero’s was the other.
Teaching children well, to respond to mental crises with a wise mythology, to hold them when they cry, embrace them when they laugh, advise them when they’re wrong or just confused, raise them to be worthy of their very consciousness, to be conservators of nature, to love to read, to know real life’s not on a screen, and know what forces are against them, power on a global scale, that represses them as individuals by targeting the masses, that in turn the children’s kids will be of the people, and it’s for them that they must act. When two succeeding generations know this, all injustice will end. When the mass moment of clarity is its acceptance of its circumstance, peace will finally take power at the unduckable end.
Swinging arms in circles, stretching hamstrings, doing shoulder rolls, these send caca-phonies to ground. These moves prop up the scaffolding of love. They reinforce its structure, are sealants against erosion, shield us from the cataclysmic weather that will vex our poor grandchildren. May they put the music that we made into the music that we loved, in that near existence where the oceans have got higher and the air has gotten hotter but the internet lives in. Let them find us on the blockchain, where there’s proof we were not faked or altered. That by knowing what we loved, the grandchildren can feel just how we would have loved them, held them, taught them, cared.